Intro to Canva: The Guy Kawasaki Interview

Easy Graphic Design for Your Business with Canva

Lesson Info

Intro to Canva: The Guy Kawasaki Interview

Hello and welcome to creative live folks today we have our workshop easy graphic design for your business with canada our instructor today is matt stevenson he's a creative director of fathom creative and he has done some amazing worth with clients such as world bank, showtime and national geographic our first morning that you'll see is going to be camera basics than our next segment we're going be talking all about workflow and then will finally go into very specifics for entrepreneurs and how you can learn to create graphics for yourself our audience might not know what canada is what is it all right in the simplest frase possible canada is a free cloud based layout designed tool great so it's like photoshopped in design illustrator all sort of wrapped in the one that's it fantastic well you guys were so excited here creative life to be bringing on we're gonna have a little interview with matt and someone that you may know guy kawasaki now guy is a former chief evangelist at apple an...

d he has now taken that title over to canada and he is working with them to help spread the word about this amazing software so let's give it up for how are you great we're gonna have a little chat all right all right so I have to ask my very first question what is an evangelist and why would you evangelize for canada? Ok, so the word evangelism comes from greek roots and it means bringing the good news sown evangelists brings good news in the christian sense of eternal life when I worked for macintosh or for the apple, the apples division macintosh, I was bringing the good news about this new computer that would increase people's creativity and productivity. And so now I'm working for campbell, and I'm bringing the news of the democratization of design so I would say it's their prior to canada, you had to buy or rent an expensive piece of software or multiple pieces of software, and probably even mohr difficult was the learning curve to come up to speed. And so I think what canada does because it's it's fast, it's free it's ubiquitous is that now people who could have never design graphics can do it because it's free and because it's easy and so this is the good news of canada that everybody can design great graphics. That's great! Have you used canada yourself? Sort of improved your design work? Yes, what happened was I and a woman a pickets patrick, who is helping with social media. We're using it and canvas saw that I was using canada, and they reached out to me and the rest is history. A few weeks later, I was working for them, you spoke a little bit about who can va is for who is using canned banal any organizations that we've heard over that we know of? Well, there's a little bit of confidentiality, but for example, techcrunch huffington post they use it because they need to create graphics all the time right for social media for their post things you'll see that it is used by designers it is used by people who can't afford designers it's used by people who may work for large organizations but you know how when you work for a large organization and you need a graphic and you need it now doesn't exactly work like that, right? And so this is this is kind of empowering people to not have to get in the queue for the design of our grid and at the same time it also empowers the design department to whip out graphics faster. So it's just all in all it's a very easy evangelism job. Yeah, there's a concept that I call guys golden touch and guys golden touch is not whatever I touched hers the gold I wish that was true guys golden touch is whatever his gold guy touches on. So I'll tell you, you know, lots of people ask me what's the key to evangelism and the key to evangelism is you evangelize good stuff because it is very easy to evangelize good stuff it's very hard to evangelize crap so touch what's gold, right? Right. Um part of being gold, I imagine is solving problems that everyday people have not just designers but non designers as well. What kinds of problems specifically can canvass all we know it's a design tool? Yes, that would be oh, the use case you want to make a beautiful graphic to accompany a social media post? Um my experience is social media is if you have a graphic as opposed to plain text post you'll double or triple engagement. So the simple act of making a graphic which takes under five minutes, doubles your your engagement that's huge, right? I mean, they're people who consider themselves like these black magic ceo people and getting ten or fifteen percent and you gotta jump through all these hoops and perform all these contortions it's really simple. You make a graphic attitude, you double wow, life is good. So there's that these case let's say that you need to make an I a b medium format at three hundred by two. Fifty? Well, I tell you something if you told most small businesses all right, you need a three hundred by two fifty ad have at it I don't even know where to begin. I mean, yeah, so you you know, you boot photoshopped the first thing it does is it says oh, you're not connected to the internet and the second thing now that you're connected, this is ah enter your do will be password for your account and then we're gonna update photo shop and finally get photoshopped booted and it was this big black window and there's like five thousand tools around it and all you want to do is make it three hundred by two fifty right that's sort of the the use case yeah, I make sense so I have a couple stats about where candy is right now six point four million users fifty four million designs created. The company itself has over seventy employees it's growing like crazy. The launch date was on ly back in august two thousand twelve it's come a long way in a couple of years guys going todo where's it going? What what's can we're going to do next or where do you see the product living in the in the world of the share of future so the time that chief evangelist with ceo okay, uh, I'm not sure what she would say that's what his question what in my mind we wanted every graphic on the internet made and get that that's a good girl, no delusional like steve jobs he wanted every computer to be a macintosh, right? Yeah, you know, very cool anything else that that you can offer talk to us about candle may be something that you want people tio know about it that we haven't discussed. I think they have. The key to understanding canberra is that, uh, it is an environment where experimentation, where creativity is fostered, it is encouraged the ability to change things. It's whiskey, wig, it's fast, it's free that's what I'm going to do I mean, it's, not this kind of big, heavy thing where oh, my god, you know, if you like, move one little piece of taxing, the whole thing might be coming down. It's it's, I don't know if this is a good analogy because it could be taken negative it's kind of like legals, right? You know, when you use legos, carry, break the thing, you don't have to follow the diagram and you can build whatever you want, it's kind of like that home like nice it's a nice it's meant to empower people it's not meant to be this high and tool that, you know you have to like, you know, I don't know if this is true, you would think I would know because I'm japanese but there's a story that in japan, when you become a sushi chef, it takes like seven years right in the first two years all you're doing is sharpening knives and the third year you get the wash, the visuals and the fourth year you know, you get the place to which of all the cutting board in the fifth year you cut the visual in the sixties you could find he touched the rice in the seven years when you're serving people, write a statement if this is a camp which diving right now I like that a lot. In addition to being for non designers, you also mentioned that designers can use this as well. Can you tell me a little bit about where canada fits in to the rest of the design? Ls is it is it for creating illustrations or sketches? Or is it for is it more like layout based? Where does it fit in with all the big room now the camera is a very flexible tool so he could do all of those it sort of depends on it. Would you use canada to make a client's logo? Unlikely, right, but once that digital acid has created, would you use can va to share that asset with the rest of the team to enforce everybody using the same digital ass at the same logo, the same font, the same color palette all that stuff? Absolutely so once those kinds of digital assets are created hallelujah for deployment I think in the professional sense it is all about it if you have let's say you have ah group of five social media people and they're all they all need to make pinterest's they all need to make instagram they all need to make ah ten twenty four by five twelve twitter graphic they need to make a square one for instagram uh this is a way where ok guys you know we all agree this is the red we're going to use this is the green organ eases the black we're going to use this is the digital ass that we're going to use this is the fun we're going to use we can upload our own fonts to canvas so we can specify all that think of a situation where let's say you're running something like a nation right nationwide real estate for and so you have these thousands of brokers and they're they're going and they're creating listings and you want your local on this flyer in the same place you want the same local right right? And you're like all the flyers to basically with the same headline in one place there's the agents picture the bottom right corner and all that so you designed that you tell all your agents okay? This is harmless this is the template drop your pictures in there click on print hallelujah nice that's really great um I think that's, all the questions that I have for you, thank you so much for coming out of the same really great. I'm excited to dive in with more we're making a quick. We're going to die right in, just like cannibal, let you sort of directing, right? You're tired of hearing me, yeah, awesome, thank you for doing thank you guys very much.

Class Description

Beautiful graphics are essential for running a thriving business and Canva offers users a free and easy way to create them.

In Easy Graphic Design for Your Business with Canva, you’ll get to know the Canva interface and how to take full advantage of its powerful features.

You’ll learn how to:

Combine images and text

Build graphics for social media

Share and download projects

You’ll also learn about the basic principles of design and how to create graphics that are as effective as they are beautiful.

Guy Kawasaki will be on hand to offer tips on how you can use Canva-created graphics in business and how your designs can elevate and grow your brand.

The Canva interface makes it easy for anyone to drag and drop design elements into elegant, professionally-designed templates and this class will help you ensure that every project you complete is top-notch.

Redawna

This was a fantastic course!
You will walk away from this course confident, skilled and knowledgeable enough able to create amazing deliverables/images/graphics for all social media platforms. Especially if you are completely intimidated by design and don't know where to start, this course is for you! (that was me)
I really enjoyed seeing into the mind of a designer with his tips & rules about fonts, flow, colors and brand integrity
I have made some fantastic designs! Thank you Matt, Canva and Creative Live! Absolutely one of my best CreativeLive purchases.

Barbara Schiffman

Great course, great teacher -- I'm a Canva and design novice but am now creating book covers for my own books/ebooks. Matt taught me things about using Canva's tools that have already improved my design "eye" and skills -- especially about the value of simplicity. Many thanks!